The Complete Career Library
The Complete Career Library
Now, for the first time, you can buy the complete set of my career coaching and personal growth books as a single bundle—four books for the price of three!
All books include free updates for life.
Reviews
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “Hilariously relatable reading. I nodded so much at some points I gave myself a neck-ache.” [My Horrible Career]
—Stephen Ocampo
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “The book I wish I’d had when I was starting out. I can’t recommend it enough.” [Code For Your Life]
—Jon Bodner (author of Learning Go)
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “I really loved reading this book. It will be valuable for everyone, from those starting their career today, to those already well entrenched in the industry.” [Code For Your Life]
—Anish CR
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “At last, a really practical and useful book on life skills for engineers. No waffle, just actionable tips on how to focus, organise yourself, and generally get a grip on things. I love it.” [Monk Mode]
—Richard W. Shepard
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “This book is like a gentle friend who listens to your worries, reassures you, and then takes you out for a walk through a wildflower meadow to cheer you up and gladden your heart. It's the ultimate antidote to anxiety and burnout, the bane of the tech industry.” [Monk Mode]
—Natalie Morris
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “This book is just the kick in the pants I needed. It's time to stop dreaming about independence and actually start doing something about it.”
—Erwin Mathew [Master of Your Domain]
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “I love the practical approach: focused, actionable advice on how to get my career on track and start building my own business. The book has a lot of valuable lessons they don't teach you on any MBA course.” [Master of Your Domain]
—Sara Van Bruggen
About the books
My Horrible Career
This will make me sound like a massive hypocrite (especially as the author of Code For Your Life), but I never really had a career plan as such. I just bounced around the tech industry for a few decades and ended up somewhere more or less randomly that's turned out to be pretty great. In this book, I share some war stories about my horrible career: how I got into this business, how I made it my business, and also how I made my seven hundred worst mistakes, so that you won't have to.
I've ended up in a pretty decent place. I'm running my own company that supports me and my family. No one can tell me what to do or when to do it. I have the freedom to work on, learn about, or write about whatever I want, providing I can occasionally turn that into money. I no longer feel that life is passing me by, while I dance to somebody else's tune. Instead, I'm living it on my own terms. So what does that look like? How do I pay the bills as an independent writer, teacher, and content creator?
You'll learn my hard-won business secrets, as well as hearing the full story of everything that went wrong along the way. And if your career has occasionally taken a wrong turn or two, take heart: when you hear about mine, you'll realise there's hope for us all!
Code For Your Life
Where is your career going? What are the secrets of finding a great job in tech, passing the interview, and working well in a development team? How can you plan and negotiate your promotions, pay rises, and contracts? How do you become a master of your technical craft? Does your future lie in management or on the staff engineer track? When is it time to launch your own business, and how can you succeed as an independent engineer? This book has the answers.
Based on interviews with dozens of successful tech professionals, and featuring hundreds of practical, actionable tips, Code For Your Life is a complete manual for your career. It’ll show you how to get started, how to change jobs at the right time and for the right reason, and how to build a life you won't need a vacation from.
Monk Mode
The Buddhists say that everybody has 83 problems, which is a curiously specific number, but nonetheless it sounds about right to me. Some problems are big, some are small, some can be solved, and some can't. Usually, if you solve one problem, another simply pops up to take its place. The point is that everybody thinks “If only I could just solve my 83 problems, I'd be happy”. That's the 84th problem.
Monk Mode is, on the other hand, a book about living happily with your 83 problems, not running away from them. It’s a storehouse of practical tips and ideas for achieving balance: doing the stuff you want to do, while building in plenty of time for sitting by the lake, watching the birds, or just counting clouds. When’s the last time you gave yourself permission to do nothing at all? Maybe today’s a good day to start.
The book guides you gently through getting back on track, from how to decide what changes to make, to building the right habits that will make change stick. It shows you how to find meaning through studying a craft, and how to make the space, time, and silence in your life to hear yourself think. Meditation, nature, stillness, and movement are the tools you can use to build your own portable monastery: one that you can take with you wherever you go.
Master of Your Domain
Master of Your Domain is a complete guide to planning your career future, transitioning from employment to independence, starting and running a business, charging for your time, making and selling products, marketing, mastering your chosen craft, and passing that knowledge on to the next generation.
When you run your own firm, you’ll do only the work you want to do. You’ll set your own hours, decide your own way of working, and answer to no one. The outcome of your work will be directly correlated with the time, energy, and skill that you put into it: the harder you work, the more the rewards. If that sounds attractive, then you should read this book, because today is the perfect day to start your journey to independence.
What you get
Your digital download is a ZIP file containing the books in PDF and ePub formats. This should be suitable for any ebook reader, Kindle, computer, phone, or tablet.
You can read a sample chapter in PDF format:
Independence (from Master of Your Domain)
Updating to the latest edition
All my books come with free updates for life, so if you’ve bought a previous version of this bundle, here’s what you need to do to get the latest edition. Click the link in your original download email (make sure you save this, as it’s your key to future updates). You’ll see what looks like an error page saying your download link for the old edition has expired, but that’s okay: click the link in the text, and you’ll be sent a new download email for the current edition.